


Balance and Ruin

by SilverDagger



Series: Miscellany and Mini-fic [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Drabbles, F/F, F/M, Gen, old stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 00:43:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4685774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Magic isn't destiny</i>
</p><p>A collection of FFVI drabbles, previously posted to other communities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fascination (Celes/Locke)

Celes wonders sometimes if he knows how charming he can be.

It's the way he doesn't seem to care about anything. The way he goes easy through life, drifting, never letting it touch him.

And it's the way his charm is a mask and sometimes he lets her see the face behind it, late at night in the glow of lamplight, his body lean and scarred beneath her hands. The way he knows that some things don't get healed, but that's all right because some things do, and anyway, life goes on.

Mostly, though, it's just the way he smiles.


	2. Atonement (Setzer/Maria)

“If you insist,” she says, “on calling me beautiful Maria again, you will be finding a boot up your backside in short order.”

“Lovely Maria?”

“I don't think so.”

“Ravishing Maria?”

“No.”

“ _Gentle_ Maria?”

“Not even a chance of it.”

The gambler bows, hand over heart. “Why such disfavor?”

“Difficult to say,” she says, “but it _might_ be because you ruined the performance, abducted an _entirely different_ woman, and vanished.”

A hint of perfume as she steps closer, pushes him back against the railing. “Forgiveness can be earned.”


	3. Price of Honor (Leo)

Too much time in Vector always leaves him restive.

He'd grown up here, remembers how the city looked before its transformation by technology, before it had been Vector. It isn't home now, and he's never certain whether to call that a loss or a mercy. But he remembers this city besieged, faltering but never falling, so long ago. 

Vector is secure these days – his kingdom, his Empire. He fights a different war now, one that will bring peace, prosperity, if only he can fight well enough to end it.

Leo remembers loyalty, remembers honor. Wills himself to believe it.


	4. Trifles (Leo and Edgar)

They eat rich food in this desert kingdom, and strange to Leo's Vector-born palate. Honey-glazed rock quail, cactus fruit, sugared dates. The peppered rattlesnake is good, but burns the tongue. The king watches, eyes glinting with detached amusement. “Too hot for your tastes, General?”

Leo shakes his head, raises a goblet of fine white wine to his lips. He cannot dispel the feeling that he is being judged, on his manners or something more abstract.

“Fine fare,” he says. “I am simply unaccustomed to such rare spices.”

The king laughs, guileless and charming, all acuity disappearing behind his smile.


	5. End of the Line (Shadow, three-sentence fic)

The floor is solid beneath your feet, polished wood worn smooth by the tread of time, and you can feel the rattle of wheels vibrating up through your bootheels, the slight clammy chill in the odorless air and the growing certainty that you're not making this up; it's real, and it's getting to you - not because you're afraid of ghosts, but because maybe, if you could only see beneath those hooded shrouds they wear, you'd find a few faces you know.

It's a delusion; a train is transportation, not a place for anyone to stay, and wherever these people are going, you know that anyone else you might have sent on their way - and anyone you failed to see off at the station - is already long gone.

You focus on the sound of the others' footsteps, louder than they should be, and you keep a few shuriken close to hand - ghosts die too, it turns out, and it's best not to spend too much time on the implications of _that_ \- and as long as Sabin keeps cracking dumb jokes to keep from jumping out of his skin, it's easy not to let your mind wander too far in the wrong direction; still, the thought is there, whenever you let yourself look too long at the other passengers, or the dark forest speeding by outside and the sky without stars: this is where you should be, just one more faceless phantom, and maybe you should take a seat and settle in, late but not unwelcome, and wait to see what's coming at the end of the line.


	6. Among Thieves (Celes/Locke)

To say that she cannot betray him is a lie. She is a traitor twice over, enough blood on her hands to stain a river red, and she has killed innocents before without flinching. She could betray him, and easily. But she will not.

It is not honor. But Celes Chere pays her debts.

So she goes with him, and his ragged idealists, though she thinks them fools and doomed – because the other side of foolish and doomed is cunning and powerful, and she has had her fill of power. Because she doesn't have to help them. Because she can.


	7. Pretty Things (Terra/Celes)

For as long as she can remember, Terra's possessions have been beautiful things. Her tunic is finely woven, if torn now and fraying at the hem, and her sword is a work of art in tempered steel. The first thing she remembers holding was a crown, and it was heavy, and sat uneasy in her hands.

Now she leans back as Celes threads fingers through her hair and pins there a plain ribbon, ties it fast.

Enchanted, she knows. Intended to protect.

It is worth remembering that Celes cares little for pretty things, and nothing for things she can own.


	8. In Fortune's Hand (Terra/Celes)

She falls like a star from a dying sky. 

Setzer throws the Falcon into a dive, all power to engines. The air is acrid with the smell and taste of burning, red clouds reflecting the glow of unnatural fires in the distance. They killed a god today, and they still can't save one of their own.

The wheel spins. The sky burns. The tower falls around them.

Then she's in his arms, and everything is right again. Ruin doesn't win this hand. Something, still, can be salvaged.

When things fall, they fall. 

But sometimes, with luck, you can catch them.


	9. Thaw (Celes)

Spring is cold in Kohlingen. Water runs in rivulets from mountain peaks, gathers, feeds into burgeoning rivers. Snow lines the banks, white on dark, broken by the green shoots of crocuses. 

Locke thinks she's mad for bathing in those glacial streams – says she'll catch her death, though she reminds him every time that it hasn't happened yet. The water is bracing, swift with runoff, a welcome chill. Currents slip through her fingers, stealing heat and promising springtime. 

Water, like death, is no easy thing for her to catch. She's long since learned to give up trying, and let it go.


	10. Spectrum (Ensemble)

_Indigo (Locke)_

 

There is a shade that fills the sky after the sun has set, a soft-edged boundary color blurring the line between dark and molten gold.

He remembers it best as dusk in the mountains of Kohlingen with Rachel there beside him, warm despite the encroaching cold. And it was the color of the sky over Albrook before the departure to Crescent Island – the night when he sat outside, wishing but not believing that Gestahl's words of peace were true, hoping and almost believing that Celes had never been false.

It's the color of things ending, and Locke knows it well.

*

_Pink (Relm, Interceptor, and Shadow)_

 

Interceptor is not a pet.

Interceptor is a sleek, lethal machine, bred from wolves and no less a killer than Shadow himself, and even that Imperial general keeps her distance at the sight of the dog's raised hackles and bared teeth. But the fact that Interceptor eats strangers does not seem to have interfered with the beast's willingness to lie quietly while little Relm scratches behind his ears, ties pink ribbons around his neck.

Still, even Shadow, watching now from the doorway, is not too much of a coward to acknowledge that the child had never been a stranger at all.

*

_Gold (Edgar)_

 

Edgar bought the coin from a pawnbroker when he was fourteen years old, from a back-alley shop his father hadn't known existed. Real gold, the man had told him, with a genteel smile and a predatory glint in his eyes, and Edgar had shelled out the asking price without question, because he was young and stupid and that such a thing would come in handy one day.

He holds the coin to the light now, turning it over, tracing the crowned sillhouette adorning both sides. His father's likeness, though it never did look much like the old king at all. 

It's not real gold, of that Edgar is certain. It's too light, it was sold too cheaply, but it has already proven far more valuable than true gold could ever be, and he smiles at the reminder that sometimes it's appearances that matter most.

He flips the coin one more time, watches it rise and catches it on the downward arc, not bothering to see which side falls face up because he knows it doesn't matter. Edgar Roni Figaro makes his own luck. In this world, he knows he'll be needing it.

It's time for Gerad to take the stage.

*

_Silver (Terra and Setzer)_

 

Magic doesn't matter, Setzer tells her once.

It's late night, and quiet, and she's feeling the solitude keenly. She sleeps less than other people, unaccustomed to keeping human hours, human ways, and he sleeps less than anyone she's known. He sits, tossing dice in one hand, languid and effortlessly idle.

She isn't expecting conversation. He's never said more than a few words to her before, and those superficial, guarded. Perhaps this time the wine has loosened his tongue, or the night has, that uncanny sense of separation from the real.

“It's what you make of yourself,” he says, “not what runs in your veins. Magic isn't destiny.”

“I'm not a weapon, is what you mean to say.”

“Not if you don't choose to be.” It isn't often she sees him so serious, not on the surface. He sets the dice down, and then he's looking at her intently, eyes bright with wine and something that isn't wine, something wry and shifting in his easy smile.

“You're as human as I am,” he says.

She leans close, catches a lock of his silver hair and twines it around her finger.

“I wouldn't be surprised,” she says.

*

_Red (Celes)_

 

As a girl, red was always her favorite.

A strange choice, her instructors thought. She was such a pale child, they said – snow in her veins, eyes the delicate blue of a glacial stream. She was made for winter. But red was the color of the blossoms that fell in the training yard every year, incongruously bright against the towering steel fortress of her home. It was the color of the tiny flames that Terra held between cupped palms, painting her skin in ruddy hues.

When Celes was sixteen, they sent her to Maranda. Red isn't her favorite color anymore.

*

_Green (Terra)_

 

Terra's hair is no longer the color of new grass. It is white and grey, the color of clouds, her face a fine wrinkled parchment. Her hands are calloused from a lifetime's work, as much of it in the garden as with a sword. No one would take her, now, for a creature that had ever been other than human.

She feels heavy in this mortal body, tired, joints aching. Pine needles crunch beneath her feet as she runs, faster now, not stopping. The forest ends; the cliff is there, and the ocean. She takes a flying leap.

She flies.

*


	11. World's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every last one of us can do better than to give up.

Terra wakes to dry grass around her and dull red sky above, distant smoke in the air. There's a splitting headache behind her eyes, and her magic – her magic is wrong. It twists in her hands, flares and flickers uneasily, and she fears to call on it, lest she set this field alight.

She starts walking, setting sun on her left, an indistinct smudge ahead that might be a town. It's something, at least. If she dies, she'll die on her feet. If she lives – 

No. She _will_ live. Seeds survive, and burned forests grow back. Kefka hasn't won yet.

*

The air in the caves is sweltering. Locke navigates narrow ledges over molten rock, past poison vents; he rations water, rests when he must, presses on when he can. He doesn't consider turning back.

No man can challenge death, the stories say, but there are other stories too, of secrets beneath the earth for those bold enough to claim them. It's not about treasure. It's about stealing back what never should have been taken to begin with. It's about Rachel, who would do the same for him.

This time – _this_ time, Locke will find a way to make things right.

*

Edgar builds a name for himself in Nikeah – a literal name, and a life to go with it. Gerad has no kingdom to find; he cares for gold, and wine, and dark-eyed women with painted lips and red skirts. At night, he drinks with thieves, laughs about the day's haul and gradually, carefully brings them around to plans for something bigger. 

Gerad will betray all these men before he's through. Sometimes he's sorry about that. But Edgar's first concern is for Figaro, and the safety of his people. Everything else is negotiable. Nothing else will stand between him and home.

*

Sabin wanders.

Stories grow behind him – a traveling monk, a monster-slayer who asks for nothing but a roof and a meal to keep him until morning. He never stays longer, though some have asked. Sabin has no destination, but he has a goal, and he listens to the stories that precede him too: a masked killer with a dog at his side, a thief seeking rumors of treasure. When he arrives in the towns those stories name, he finds only phantoms.

He could stay, when they ask him, find a home, accept the world as it is.

He never does.

*

It isn't easy, sailing a raft through open, storm-wracked sea. By the time Celes makes landfall, her hands are raw with rope burns, eyes stinging and hair stiff with salt. The rocky coast has no sign of life except scrubby beach grass as far as she can see, but it _is_ life, useless to her though it is, and something in her chest eases at the sight. Her hand falls to the kerchief at her belt, the frayed fabric reminding her – she's not alone in a dead world.

She sets off toward the cliffs, buoyed by the memory of kindness.


End file.
